The color reproducibility of printers has improved markedly in recent years and such printers are now capable of meeting various demands. For example, these include a proof output for calibrating the output of the printer, and a print service for printing images captured by a digital camera.
In order to improve the color reproducibility of an output image in an application for satisfying the above-mentioned demands, it is extremely important to                match colors between printers of different models; and        accommodate individual differences between printers of the same model.        
The Color Management System (CMS), which is based on an ICC profile, has been into practice as a color management arrangement for implementing the above points.
An ICC profile is mainly divided into a tag portion, which describes the correspondence between device-independent color space (Lab, XYZ, etc.) and device color space (RGB, CMYK, etc.), and a header portion that describes the attributes of the profile itself. In CMS, the profile of a target printer to undergo color matching and the profile of a printer that actually produces the output are set in a CMM (Color Matching Module) as a source profile and output profile, respectively, and color matching is then executed according to the following flow: target-device color space, device-independent color space, output-device color space.
Owing to the strong non-linearity of the device characteristic in the printer profile, generally the correspondence between device-independent color space and device color space in the tag is implemented in the form of a LUT. Lab color space often is adopted as device-independent color space. In other words, in the case of an RGB printer, the corresponding relationship between color values in the tag is retained in the form of a LUT of RGB-Lab and a LUT of Lab-RGB.
In order to create such a profile, it is required that a number of color patches for describing the characteristics of the printer be printed out by the printer and that the color patches be measured by a colorimetry device.
Thus, since it is necessary to output a number of color patches and measure the colors thereof in order to create the profile of a printer, a great deal of time is required. Naturally, the profile of a printer cannot be created unless the printer is at hand.
Further, there is also demand to perform color matching using as a reference a print sample that has been printed out by a certain specific printer. In such case a profile cannot be created in the above-described manner because a color-patch output from the printer cannot be acquired.
Thus, if the profile of a printer that is the target of an output cannot be created, suitable color matching to which CMS is applied is difficult to carry out at this printer.